In this enlightening episode of our eCommerce Podcast, we sit down with Travis Zigler, a seasoned entrepreneur and eCommerce expert, to explore the pivotal shift that can redefine success in the online business landscape. Travis shares his invaluable insights on how focusing on solving customer problems over pushing products can lead to unprecedented growth and a deeper connection with your audience. Join us as we delve into strategies that can revolutionise your approach to eCommerce.

In this episode, you'll learn:

1. The Importance of Problem-Based Businesses: Discover why orienting your business around solving specific customer problems is more effective than a product-centric approach.
2. The Power of Authentic Content: Learn how leveraging live streaming and long-form content can enhance your brand's authenticity and connect with your audience on a personal level.
3. Passion Over Profit: Travis shares his philosophy on building a business you're passionate about, highlighting the long-term benefits of focusing on value creation rather than just selling.
4. Strategies for eCommerce Success: Practical tips and strategies for applying these principles to your own eCommerce business for transformative growth.

Key Takeaways:

• The distinction between problem-based vs product-based business models.
• The effectiveness of live streaming and long-form content in building an authentic brand.
• The importance of building a business around your passion and the impact on sustainability and growth.
• Strategies to engage and solve real problems for your customers, leading to deeper brand loyalty and increased sales.

Whether you're just starting out in eCommerce or looking to take your established business to new heights, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Travis Zigler's journey from optometrist to eCommerce success story is a testament to the power of focusing on customer problems and building a brand that truly resonates. Tune in to learn how you can make this simple shift and transfor

Hello and welcome to the eCommerce Podcast with

me, your host, Matt Edmundson.

This is a show all about helping you deliver eCommerce wow.

And to help us do just that, today I am chatting with our special guest,

Travis Zigler from Profitable Pineapple about lead generation and no doubt about

his rather interesting cap that he is wearing if you're watching the video.

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Now that's the show sponsor.

Let's meet.

Today's guest, a doctor, Travis Zigler, a visionary in more ways than

one, from optometrist to ecommerce whiz, Travis, alongside his wife,

Jenna, soared to new heights with Eye Love, turning it into a success story

before selling it in 2021, the same year I sold my business, ironically.

Now, not just a business maven, He's a philanthropic hero as well, using his

skills in Amazon PPC and Google Ads to support non profits and fuel his mission

to bring vision to a billion people in need through the I Believe Foundation.

Travis, welcome to the show, man.

Great to have you.

Loving the hat, loving what you guys are trying to do with

reaching a billion people.

It's really great to chat to you.

Matt, thanks for having me on and looking forward to giving

a lot of value to your audience.

And yeah, let's jump in.

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it.

Tell me about the, before we do jump in, tell me about the, I believe,

thing that you've got going on.

Yeah.

So I'm pretty fortunate in the fact that I discovered my purpose and my passion

back in 2006 when I was still in school.

And I went on a mission trip in Ecuador to help people in rural Ecuador, people

that can't afford nor obtain eye care.

And I was a third year optometry student.

And just had some life changing experiences meeting people there.

And what we noticed is that you can put a pair of reading glasses on someone.

And these are reading glasses that you and I can just go to the

corner store and buy for a dollar.

these people don't have access to that.

And these are people that thought they were blind.

They couldn't read anymore.

It's been 30 years since they've read a book.

And you throw these reading glasses on them.

Their life changes forever, they start crying, they think you're like a miracle

worker, and really it's just a pair of reading glasses, it's just physics.

And I had that experience back in 2006, and when I first did that we saw about

1200 patients that week, and helped them get glasses, and I was forever changed.

And the I Believe Foundation was started back in 20, I want to

say 2017, as a result of we get donations, mostly from ourselves.

And then we get to tax deduct them when we donate to our own

foundation, but then we use that money to fund third world clinics.

And we've done about 14 clinics total in our life now, and about 60, 000

patients have been helped so far, as far as getting glasses, surgeries

that they need, cataract surgery.

Eye exams.

So I was lucky to find my purpose and my passion very early, and everything

I do now is to either help other people find their passion or their

purpose, or to help them realize that they're not in this for the money,

they're in for what the money can do.

And so I show that and we do it by action, and that's what the,

I believe foundation's all about.

Fantastic.

It sounds like a very noble cause and obviously something

that you're deeply connected to.

Is your wife connected into that as well?

Yeah, so we're both optometrists and she was on that trip

as well on that very first mission trip.

And we've done 14 mission trips together.

We've never done one separate.

And just to go into it one step further, what most people don't

realize is that there are 1 billion people, 1 billion with a B, people

that are blind due to lack of glasses.

Like I just saying that story, putting a pair of reading glasses on someone.

There are 1 billion people that are blind just because of that.

And so they just can't obtain eye care.

And so that's what we're trying to do is create more sustainability in these areas.

But right now we just do what are called like mash style clinics where

we jump in there, see two to 3000 patients, and then we're out of there.

We're trying to create more sustainability.

And so teaching people on those islands, how to fit glasses, how to fit readers.

And then if they have trouble and they can't figure it out, then they

can refer to a doctor if needed.

Yeah that's great, man.

That's great.

I've come across a number of these charities where you can, and

tell me what you think to them.

I appreciate it's nothing to do with ecommerce, but I'm just genuinely curious.

Where you wear glasses, you change your prescription or whatever it is.

I've got a bunch of old glasses and cause I had the laser eye surgery done.

So I had a bunch of old glasses in the drawer.

Are they of use to anybody or is it not really of any use to anyone?

It is, so you can donate to the Lions Club and Lions Club is an

international organization, so it doesn't matter where you are in the world.

And what the Lions Club does is they clean them up and they organize them and

they tell us what the prescription is.

And then on some trips, we'll actually take a bunch of glasses with us

and then we'll look at somebody's prescription, figure it out, and then

we'll go try to find glasses for them.

Now, with our mission trips, we're a little more sophisticated than that, just

cause we've been doing it for so long.

We actually get labs in the U.

S.

to partner with us.

And so we'll actually do custom glasses for almost everybody.

We'll go back to the U.

S., we'll have all the glasses made, and then we'll go back down to the country,

wherever we saw the patients, and then we'll dispense all the glasses to people.

And you'd be surprised by, you'd think that we'd lose a lot of patients

in that regard, but we actually still see, probably dispense like

95 to 99 percent of the glasses.

Still, even though we're coming back at a later date,

wow.

So you're still involved with this?

You're still doing this on a regular basis?

we try to do two to three trips a year.

The organizations that I work with, we do four trips a year.

My wife and I try to do two a year.

We have two young kids though, so it makes it very hard.

So right now in our young kids stage, we are just doing one trip a year.

And so we lead for Todos Santos in about three months or so.

And that's in Mexico.

Fantastic.

Keep up, it sounds very cheesy, doesn't it?

Or corny maybe is the right word, but keep up the good work.

Sounds amazing, to get involved in something like that and using the

skills that you've got for good.

I get to see the world, so it's selfish too.

I get to see parts of the world that no one will ever see.

Yeah, that's true.

You get to see different parts of it.

And I suppose it's a beauty of mission trips, isn't it?

And aid trips and things like that.

And getting off the beaten track a little bit and seeing maybe a different

side to people, a different side to the world that you don't see in the

tourist brochures, which is always quite.

But alas, let's carry on the conversation about ecommerce,

and let's start with that.

So we're talking about lead generation.

This is what you guys do.

And I know in the prequel to the show, you talked Sadaf about the sort of the

five step process that you guys have.

So why don't we start there and jump in.

Bearing in mind, obviously, we're all ecommerce dudes, or dudettes,

or, I call myself an ecommerce dinosaur, Travis, I'm not going to

lie, I've been around a little while.

So I'm really keen, really curious to hear what your process is for lead generation

and then I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions as we go through it.

No doubt.

Yeah.

So the mistake I see that most common like ecommerce entrepreneurs make is they build

a business based on product selection.

They say, that product looks like a great opportunity, so now I'm going to

build a business around that product, and that's the wrong way to look at it.

And I constantly beat this.

Every show I go on, every video I make, it's not about product selection.

It's about people selection.

People is where it's all about.

And when you focus around a problem that maybe your product will solve,

and you build your business around a problem, a very specific problem,

that's how you build a real business.

That's how you build a real audience.

But if you don't have a problem to base your business around, it's going to

be very hard to build that audience.

And this is the case for any business.

It's not just an ecommerce business.

I've grown a brick and mortar store.

To multi six figures, we got that to about 600 before we sold it.

I've built a physical products ecommerce store to multi millions.

I've built an agency to multi millions, and now I'm building a software.

We're only at about 60, 000 in annual recurring revenue right now,

but we just started it in June.

And every theme for all these businesses is the same theme.

I focus it around a very specific problem to a very specific person and

all my messaging is towards that person.

And that is step one of lead generation, that is step one of business startups,

that is step one of building a business and scaling a business, is

focus everything around a problem.

My ecommerce business was all around dry eye.

Everything we did is we spoke to the post menopausal female that's suffering

from dry eye due to hormonal changes.

And then we came out with products that she used on a daily basis

for her dry eye and for her face cleansing, eyelid cleansing routine.

So we had a face wash, we had an eye cream, and then more

specifically, we had eyelid cleansers.

We had eyelid wipes.

We had warm compresses.

These are all things that a person that is a postmenopausal

female that has dry eye uses.

And so we identified the problem being dry eye.

Our YouTube channel was called The Dry Eye Show.

Our podcast was called The Dry Eye Show.

Everything was dry eye.

And people are like, dry eye, like, why would you do it around that?

It's a very specific problem that gets a lot of searches a month.

And that's what we dove into.

And we were optometrists as well.

And the funny thing is we moved from Ohio working for someone else to South

Carolina to start our own practices.

And we wanted to be a pediatric clinic, a clinic for kids.

And God had other plans for us.

And he threw all geriatrics at us.

Like it was old person after old person.

And it took us down this path of okay, we need to do a dry eye and a glaucoma

clinic because it's very common to see that in that post menopausal

female, older geriatric crowd.

And then one day we were selling a bunch of products on our shelf.

And someone was, I was at a, I was actually at a conference and there was

a doctor on stage and they were drilling him with questions and he was talking

about his practice and how he was selling these products and this product.

And someone was just like, you're the expert, sell your own products.

And that's when a light bulb went off that I'm selling all these other people's

products, building other people's brands.

I need to build my own brand.

And that's how the dry eye product business started was I started just.

Literally everything that we sold on a shelf for dry eye, we started coming out

with it and that's how we started it.

And then we started selling it online, but it all started going

back to step one, the problem.

What was the problem?

So the, it's interesting, isn't it?

Because I was talking about this on a previous show, where we're just

talking more about entrepreneurship than ecommerce, but how entrepreneurs are very

good at spotting problems and fixing them.

I don't know if we're very good.

At marketing the problem, if that makes sense, as in telling people this is the

problem that you are suffering with.

And I'm gonna show you how we solve it.

I'm curious though, 'cause you said for you this is the number one mistake

everybody makes, so it becomes product focused rather than problem focused.

Does starting with the problem of dry eye.

then coming up with a product differ from going, this is a really

interesting product for dry eye.

I'm going to take that.

I think there's a community over here, which I think I

can reach if that makes sense.

Yep.

So it does make sense.

And the key differences are you looking for an opportunity to sell and make money?

Or are you looking for?

Something that you can become passionate about and go into that, because products

come and go, problems usually don't.

The problem is always going to be there, and it's how you solve it.

Products will come and go, and usually when you have, and I'm talking about

a very specific physical product.

Let's, actually let's zoom out a little bit and talk about a big

problem right now, is the lack of education in the AI space.

There's all these AI tools out there, but we don't know how to use them.

And so what you're seeing pop up are all these courses on how to use AI.

That is an opportunity.

That is a very specific prop, product for a problem right now.

But when you focus on just the product, it's only going to be

around for about 18 to 24 months.

And then it's going to be so diluted because you're going to be able to

find anything you want on YouTube to be able to educate yourself on

whatever AI software you want to use.

I don't know how I can take this to a problem, but if we focus it over to a

problem, the problem's always there.

So let's say I want to learn lead generation.

There's always going to be problems in lead generation and people are always

going to be seeking that specific problem

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so if we just focus around that problem, we can come out with

different products for whatever comes up.

So four years ago, I had a system around how to build an audience.

And I still use that same system today, but the solution has changed slightly.

The system is basically the same, but how I utilize the system has changed a lot.

I don't have to go out and hire writers anymore.

I can use Chad GPT.

Yeah.

I don't have to go out and think anymore because I can use Chad GPT.

No, I'm just kidding.

But it's

only you were.

But the point is like, when I focus my business around a

problem, I adjust the products for what's new and what's coming out.

So my lead generation system used to take four weeks to come out with an

article and I'm sure we'll get into it here in just a little bit, but it used

to take me like four weeks to write an article, start advertising for it

and start generating leads for it.

I can do it now in 30 seconds.

Because of ChatGPT, and I don't have to hire people.

I don't have to manage people.

It's all through ChatGPT.

And so the problem remains the same.

The product has changed.

So when you focus on product, you're focusing on an opportunity.

When you focus on problems, you're building a real business

that's focused around that.

And you can be flexible and change.

And I'll give one more quick example.

Were you in the physical products space?

Yeah.

I still am.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay, so you still are, so most people teach how to select the

perfect product, like I talked about earlier and source it and sell it.

The problem is everybody finds that product and everybody sources it

and everybody starts to sell it.

So it's a race to the bottom.

That was great back in 2014 and 2015 when I first started, you could throw up a

product, you could buy a hundred reviews and sell a bunch and make a lot of money.

What I noticed in 2017 though, is that it wasn't sustainable

because my products would shoot up.

12 months later, they'd start to drift down and I was

like, this isn't sustainable.

I'm just selling a piece of plastic on Amazon.

I need to focus on something real.

And so we came out with what was called the dry eye syndrome

support community on Facebook.

We just went live every week nobody, by the way.

And eventually after about six months, people started

showing up and we built that.

I think it's 22, 000 people now.

We don't own it anymore or anything, but it's still going, but we

didn't have anything to sell them.

We just wanted to serve a person.

We saw it a lot in our practice.

And we just wanted to say, Hey, we're going to focus around dry eye

and we're going to treat it a little differently than what most doctors do.

Cause we had something happen in our life where Western medicine failed

us and Eastern medicine succeeded.

We were told we could never have kids.

And then we tried Eastern medicine.

We got pregnant in six months.

And so I was like, why can't we do this for dry eye?

And so we found the dry eye problem.

We took a little bit of a different approach to it.

Taught people just simple, replace your breakfast with a green smoothie.

And drink more water.

That was it.

That was more effective than all prescriptions out there.

We actually did a study on it.

It was crazy because it was this different mindset, and

that's what drew everybody in.

But we were focusing on the problem, and our solution changed

as we came out with more products.

But at the beginning, we didn't have any products.

We were just focusing on the problem.

And there's something powerful about being able to focus on a problem

without having to sell a product.

It's actually fun.

Because a lot of your listeners probably listen to Alex Ramosi

and he says it all the time.

I have nothing to sell you.

Cause he doesn't.

He knows his demographic.

He wants somebody that's, what is it?

Like 5 million in EBITDA or higher, or 1 million in EBITDA, I think, either

that, and that's his target demographic.

And he knows that one out of every.

Probably a hundred thousand people that listen to his podcast are

going to be his target demographic.

So he has nothing to sell them.

And it's very powerful when you can solve a problem when you have nothing to sell.

And that's the difference.

And I rant a lot.

So if you need to cut me off, just cut me

Why?

Yeah, I'm no, it's good.

That's good.

This isn't a lot of things you said there, Travis.

I'd love to jump in and ask you about.

Firstly, let me, you mentioned that you did a podcast, so you livestreamed

a new podcast, and you livestreamed for six months and nobody turned up.

Now recently we had Sarah Williams on the show who mentioned something

similar, and I am curious why podcasting, why livestreaming,

and would you still do that today?

I do still do it today.

And but the mechanism has changed slightly.

And so back then we did long form.

And so we focused on long form content.

It was usually like an hour livestreaming.

We loved going live because it was authentic and real

and people love authenticity.

They don't love, you don't have to have perfect videos.

You don't have to have great editors.

They want authenticity.

That's why TikTok took off because it was all this raw video footage

that was edited by people that didn't know what they were doing.

And that's what made it fun and real.

And that's what people loved and it was entertaining.

And so it's, I still do it today.

I actually do it slightly different.

So we can talk about that a little bit.

But back then we usually focused on 30 minutes to one hour show once a

week, we got it up to three times a week, but we didn't notice anything

different as far as lead generation.

So we just went back to once a week and now the way I've changed it is.

So we built our audience up to about maybe 150, 000 people across YouTube,

across email lists, across Facebook.

And now what I do differently is we now do content.

I do one long form every Monday.

And so I go live every Monday on my channel, and then we

just do two shorts a day.

And so short form video is the way to get your reach out there.

But people say long form is dead.

Long form is not dead.

People do not have short attention spans.

You're just too boring.

Not you specifically, but it's more like if people aren't paying attention

to you, you're just too boring.

You're not giving them content they want to tune into.

So what we're doing now with YouTube is we're doing this.

It's one, not, it's like usually like 10 to 30 minutes of live every Monday,

all our short form videos, two a day.

And then we do this across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and

YouTube, but we do one mashup every month.

And what a mashup is we take a bunch of our videos that are similar topics.

We'll put them all together and we'll come out with a three to four hour long video.

Wow.

And those are crazy.

And they, what YouTube loves is when you have a three hour plus video, and this

is something that an expert taught me.

I just met with the YouTube expert.

He said three hour plus videos are killing it right now.

And this is, his name is Drew Hitchcock.

So shout out to Drew.

He's great.

He's an amazing person.

And I did my first one and my average view hours, cause I'm in a very specific

niche, Amazon PPC was 10 to 20 hours.

10 to 20 viewing hours of YouTube, and it spiked all the way up to 360 hours a day.

And so we more than, I think 20X'd our watch hours just by

doing one three hour video.

So now we're doing one three hour video or longer every single month.

And if you can do more, kudos to you, but it's exhausting

because I still do it live.

I still do it live.

So you do the whole three hours live.

So what I do is I do a mix.

So I pick my best videos in that topic and I'll go live and I'll

talk and then I'll go into a video and I'll play the recorded video.

And then once that recorded video is over, I'll talk and

then we'll play the next video.

So I preview what's coming up in between and just answer any questions

that come up in the comments.

As we go, and that shoots up your viewership, which then the more people

watch you, the more they're going to trust you, the more they're going to like you.

And that's why a podcast is so effective.

And what you're doing is because you're in somebody's ear every single day.

And that intimacy is huge.

And so they learn to trust you and they learn to know you and they know more

about you than you sometimes, because when they meet you in person, they bring

up all this stuff and you're like, I don't know who you are, they've been

listening to your podcast for years now.

Yeah.

It happens quite a lot now, actually.

It's quite funny.

Yeah, really quite funny.

And three hour long videos is quite an interesting idea because, and

you're right, long form is not dead.

Andrew Huberman show, which is one of the best listened to podcasts is normally

two and a half hours, three hours long.

Tim Ferris, Joe Rogan, all

yeah, all of those guys.

And it's just them chatting away.

But you're right, it's got to be interesting, right?

And the temptation on this show has always been, should we go to 20 minutes?

Because everyone was talking, short form, you've got to get

it down to the commute time.

And no, we don't, we like where we're at.

I feel like actually we're a short form show now when we're an hour long,

when all the other ones are like two, three hours, but yeah, interesting.

So we've got phase one Identify the problem.

Where do we go from there?

So I'm going to speak specifically, actually no, you can

use this for anything, but I'll speak specifically on like dry eye just

because that's the example we've been going off of what I do then, and this

is a very specific tactic now, is I'll take, I'll think of a list of all

the problems that my product solves.

And so dry eyes, blepharitis, It's just inflammation of the eyelids,

styes, which is a bump on your eyelids.

And I'll think of all the problems that my products can solve, or all the

problems that I'm focusing on, and I'll put them into Google Keyword Planner.

And I just search for those keywords and, Google Keyword Planner comes up with

a bunch of different keywords for you.

Yeah.

what I look for on there is words that have a high search volume.

It can be anywhere from 50, 000 and above a month to 300, a million a month.

But the higher, the better with low competition score.

And so Google Keyword Planner gives you a competition score and that competition

score and it gives you the bids as well.

But that competition is how competitive is it on Google Ads and

how expensive is it on Google Ads?

And the key thing here is when you focus on product based keywords,

everybody's going after those.

And so your bid is going to be a lot higher when you focus on problem based

keywords, your bids are a lot lower.

And so the last year I was with my company in 2022, cause I still work

for them for a year and a half.

We drove millions of clicks to our blog, an average of 6 cents a click.

Okay.

That's pretty

because it's very cheap.

It's because we focus on the problem versus the product.

And so we'd write an article, three steps to eliminate a sty.

We target STI and the solution was our product.

Now you have to be careful with FDA structure function claims.

So I'm not giving you advice on that, but it's problem

number one or step number one.

Clean your eyelids.

Use this.

Step number two, spray your eyelids.

Use this.

And it was just this problem based keyword going to a blog

post, an advertorial, if you will.

And it talks about the problem first and then the solution second.

And then your product is in the solution.

So we're getting six cent clicks to our blog, and then we're converting them to

buy over on Amazon, on our Shopify store.

We mostly push to Amazon because Amazon loves external traffic,

and so it boosts you up in the organic rank when you do that.

And so you're sending millions of clicks to your blog, and that blog

article is almost like it helps increase your conversion rate on Amazon.

Because not everybody's going to click through.

But here's where the magic happens.

When people come over to your blog, and they sit on your blog and they

read it for a long time, we usually put a video at the top too so they can

watch a video about the same topic, and when they sit on your blog for a long

period of time, your SEO increases.

And so you have these six cent clicks going over to your blog, but then as

your SEO increases, You're going to start getting organic traffic as well.

And then your ROAS goes through the roof.

Your return on ad spend just shoots up because you're now getting organic

and paid to these blog posts, plus we can get further into the strategy.

Plus we have pop ups where we're trying to get their email address as well.

So then you can further market to them as well.

I'm going to stop there just to kind of

I'm making lots of notes, Travis, as we go through.

I'm intrigued by this because you're right.

We sell on our site, and we sell on Amazon, and Amazon

loves it if we send traffic.

Using something like Google.

It's problematic in a lot of ways to send from Google direct to Amazon

for a whole bunch of reasons I won't bore people with right now.

But this idea of sending them to the blog and then using the blog to send

them to Amazon is actually, is an idea that's been around for a while.

And I think it's one of those things that people have forgotten about for a little.

Time they years ago, we did the blogs and it's let's do the blogs.

And then all this other stuff came along like TikTok, and Instagram.

And it's we'll forget about the blog over here.

And we'll focus on over here.

And actually what I like about the strategy is it's a bit old

school if you don't mind me saying but we all know it works right.

And the simple stuff works.

What I'm curious about is.

You're sending, say, a million people to your blog post.

How many of those million people are then going over to Amazon?

Do you, is it a bit like I know that if I send to my landing page on my website for

that product, I'm going to send how many, 7 percent of people going to click through

and out of those 35 percent of people are going to buy, whatever the stats are.

Did you notice that it was significantly lower or higher when you did the

blog post to Amazon strategy?

So conversion rate stays anywhere from that one to 5 percent range.

Just like it would whenever you drive to your website, if you get up to 5

percent that's great as but the reason we send to Amazon is because our

conversion rate on Amazon is so high and frictionless buying experience.

Amazon has just perfected the buying experience, makes it very

easy for the person to buy it.

Now going back to something that you were concerned with, sending Google

ads direct to Amazon, we still do that a lot for product based keywords.

Just to get them right over there, and your concern was conversion rate.

It decreases your conversion rate, but, however, it does not penalize you.

So Amazon wants you to send that external traffic.

So if you're sending Google ads direct to Amazon and it's only

converting it like one to two percent.

That's okay, because you're sending Amazon a customer and they love it, so they

will still boost you in the organic rank, even if your conversion rate is lower for

those and it will take that into account, it won't penalize you in that regard,

and same thing here, when you go to the blog and you're sending external traffic,

it's just another source of external traffic, another outside signal, I call

it my moat around your Amazon listing, so we have Google Ads Direct, we have

Google ads to a blog post, then to Amazon.

Then we do Facebook ads to Amazon.

And even though these are lower converting things, and then TikTok ads now to Amazon.

Even though they're lower converting, Amazon still rewards you because they

know their lifetime value of the customer.

They're going to get them on Prime, they're going to sell them videos,

they're going to sell them products, they're going to sell them everything.

And so they won't penalize you because you're sending them a customer.

And we've done it through countless clients and shown the data it's

crazy how fast you can rank something by sending that external traffic.

Now, with regards to the blog post, I love how you called it old school.

And that's what I love about it, is because Every entrepreneur gets

distracted by the new shiny object

Signing objects.

Yeah.

Shiny object syndrome is just you realizing what you're doing

right now is too hard to keep going.

So you're going to jump over here to try this over here because it's brand new.

It's fresh.

It's shiny.

And most entrepreneurs are quick starts.

So they hate the monotony of doing the same thing over and over again.

And they want to jump over here to do this because this is now getting too hard.

So I'm going to jump over here and start doing this and I've been

doing this strategy since 2017.

And like I said, I've built a practice with it, a brick and mortar store.

I built our ecommerce physical products brand, I built our agency,

and now I'm building my software with the same exact philosophy.

It's so old school, so awesome, and it works so well, but the cool thing is.

You can add TikTok to this strategy.

Like I said, you can add a TikTok video to the top of your blog, and

then you can have a little follow me on TikTok right below that video.

And then you can gain subscribers with this.

You can use it to gain subscribers on social media.

You can use it to build your email list.

You can build it, use it to sell digital products.

It works for absolutely anything.

You could do it for a restaurant.

I could do it for a restaurant down the street and we could make the five best

places to have dinner in Columbus, Ohio.

And then you can target just the people in the five mile radius with

that article and you're number one.

It's so easy to use this strategy.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm sold, man.

I'm sold.

So we've got the problem.

We've made a list of our problems, we've created posts, we're sending

traffic left, right and centre.

Is there anything else to this strategy that you have that we need

to think through or think about?

Yeah.

So when we've talked about it briefly, but like when we're on the blog post,

we then want to get their email address.

We're going to get them as a lead, and once you get them

into your email sequence, you then have a welcome sequence.

Most people will do short form email, then just welcome them and try to sell them.

I like to do longer emails in the welcome sequence to really go

and hit and agitate the problem a little bit more and show them, tell

them my story on how I fixed it.

So Amazon PPC, I was frustrated with it.

I hired, I had six different softwares.

I hired four agencies, they all sucked.

And so what did I do?

I came out with my own agency.

And it was because the problem just was irritated more and more to the point where

I was just like, I know how to do this.

I just need to do it.

And so then I hired my best friend.

We became co founders in the agency.

We onboarded 10 clients.

And the rest is history.

Now we have a team of 13 and we're not a big agency or we still are

very small, but we're a little higher price because we do a little bit more.

We do this whole process for

But getting them on that email sequence, they read my story, they learn the

problems I had and why I came out with it.

I do that over the course of seven emails and those long emails are

the same as your long form content.

60 minutes in someone's ear, 20 minutes of them reading an email.

If they read every single word of that email, they're yours for life.

Dry eye.

My wife had dry eye.

This is what we did to solve it.

We tell people the story of our fertility journey.

People know everything about our lives because we share intimate details.

It's authentic.

It's real.

And I don't do it to sell more products.

I do it because people want genuine connection.

We're going to be talking about email marketing with the people

they're doing business with.

People want to do business with people, not businesses.

We actually, we don't do a lot of email marketing for

clients, but we do for a couple.

And the one was like, Hey, I want to switch it.

So instead of saying my name at the end of emails, I want you

to start saying the brand name.

And we're like, absolutely not.

And I was like, we are not doing that.

This brand is personal.

This is

Yeah.

the business name.

And that goes the same thing with like your channels.

So if you guys go to follow me on social media, If you look up

Profitable Pineapple, you'll find me, but you're not going to find

many channels around Profitable Pineapple because it's around Dr.

Travis Zigler.

You look up on YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, it's Dr.

Travis Zigler.

I have made the brand me personally, and that does two things.

It makes it personal, like we just talked about, but when you're ready to pivot.

And maybe move into something else, like with me with software, I have the agency

still, and that's not going anywhere, but I'm pivoting to the software.

I can use my personal brand to help with that.

And let's say in 10 years, I don't know if I'll be doing what I'm doing

now, I still have my personal brand.

To pivot to that.

And a great example of this is Mike Dillard.

If anybody follows him out there, he's gone from magnetic marketing

to a list grow list building course to a health because he battled for

his life and he told everything he learned from that for three years.

He almost died and now he's doing richer every day.

And then he's back to audience growth.

And so like through all those pivots, I bought every single one of his products.

Because I trust him and he's a great person and great human.

So that's a great example of personal branding.

Another one, Elon Musk has 160 million followers on X, whereas

in Tesla and Tesla has I think 22 million, SpaceX has 32 million.

Tesla is the second most valuable company in the world at over a

trillion dollar valuation market cap.

Apple, I think is more right now, but I think they'll swap soon.

But Elon has 160 million followers, almost eight times more than Tesla, the

second most valuable company in the world.

So think about that when you're creating this is make it personal.

And so when you're building that email list out, don't be afraid to share.

Your struggles, your wins.

I was open and honest about what we went through in Q4.

Last year we fired our COO and five other people.

The COO was one, one of my best friends from college, and it was

probably one of the hardest decisions I made, but it was necessary and

I shared that with my audience.

Yes, our agency was in turmoil.

We had to let go of five people, but we were fine.

We're better off now than we were then.

And we were honest and people are like, that's what I love about you

is because you're so authentic.

You're so real and you're so transparent.

And so you're going to get trusted listeners.

The more personal you go.

So to answer your question, email list is the next step.

bringing it back round.

I'm curious on the personal brand, I'm aware of time, Travis, so I don't want

to monopolise all the time, but you talk about building the personal brand, and

there's always this interesting dilemma, I think, because you take someone like

Elon Musk who is a classic example.

He is, like you say, is You know, there's Elon Musk, but he is in sort of some

ways inseparable from Tesla, right?

And Tesla is built off the back of Elon Musk.

Would Tesla have been as profitable without Elon Musk?

I don't know.

And so you there's sort of these questions, isn't there?

But if I bring it into the fact that we're not all Elon Musk and probably the

circle of people we'll influence will be hundreds, not millions in a lot of ways.

If you How do you balance building your personal brand?

So let's go back to your e-commerce site that dealt with.

Try eye that you sold.

So if you build that around you and your wife, the people coming in to buy it

have then got a problem, haven't they?

Because it's built around your personality and your wife's personality.

But of course you are exiting the bus, the business.

So how did you manage that?

Yeah.

Great question.

So if your plan, everybody's plan maybe is to exit eventually.

And if you build it around you personally.

That part of the business is gonna be less valuable, and that

is true than if you did a brand.

But if you build it around your personalities, it's gonna grow faster.

So what you can do is as you start to grow and as you're getting ready

to pivot out of it, maybe sell it, plan for that, and then you can start

bringing in other doctors into the space.

So what I'm doing right now is bringing other people on my

channel that are on my team.

So people are getting used to seeing other faces on my channel.

It's still branded towards me, but if I were to ever pivot, I would

just change the name to the brand name or whatever you want to do

and start bringing other people on.

And that's what I would do.

I never build a business to sell it.

I build a business because I love to build that business.

I fall in love with the process versus the end goal.

And that's, I think, one of the biggest problems entrepreneurs have is they're so

focused on the end goal and getting there.

There Payout and their exit that they forget to fall in

love with the whole process.

And then they're miserable the whole time I love what I'm doing.

I love coaching entrepreneurs.

I love agency life, like it's very hard to manage lots of clients only

because when something's wrong, they come to me when something's not wrong.

They stay with the account manager, but it's.

No matter what you do for them, they're never happy.

And that's the we've, we have some very happy clients, but

like we had a very happy client.

We grew them over 300 percent over the course of a year and a

half, and they almost dropped us.

And it was just like, I got on the phone and I was like, what's going on?

And he told me everything.

And I was like let's just fix that.

And no matter what you do, you're building other people's brands.

And if you don't continue to do that, they'll turn on you like that.

And that's what the agency life is hard.

I don't know what I was getting at with this.

We were talking about personal brand and swapping

over, and bringing other people in,

Yeah.

So that's what I would do is just switch my channel to my brand and

then have other people on it if you're going, getting ready to sell.

But yeah, going back to how I make a business.

I don't look to sell it.

When I sold Eye Love, it was a strategic sell.

It was to somebody that was already in 6, 000 doctor's offices.

They're in 6, 000 eye care doctor's offices.

They didn't know how to do direct to consumer.

So they brought us on to do all their direct to consumer.

They have nine brands and we scaled all their brands direct to consumer.

And then they took our products to wholesale.

That was the dream.

didn't work out that way.

But that was the whole dream of what we were trying to create.

And 18 months later, they ended up, we ended up parting ways.

And unfortunately the brand's on the downswing, like always.

But it's one of those things like build a brand you love so much that

you never think about selling it.

That's just my

It's a really interesting point because, again,

I'm going old school here because when I started in entrepreneurship.

There was a chap that everybody was raving about called Michael Gerber.

He wrote the book called The E Myth and the whole premise of that book

at the time, which everybody read was you build a business to sell it.

And if you're going to build a business to sell it, you need to systemize the

crap out of it because it needs to work really well in the hands of a teenager.

And he used the Grey Croc McDonald's example, as a, as.

And how you've built a business around teenagers which someone

could then come and buy.

So he's a big fan of franchising and all kinds of stuff.

But the basic premise was, you build a business to sell it because if

you don't sell it to someone you're in effect buying it with your time.

And I love what you've talked about there because that's

actually, it's the opposite spirit.

It's no, just focus on doing something that's gonna solve a great

problem for people that you can be passionate about and you'll And

just deal with that, and face that.

I think it was it's quite an interesting, thing.

Flip to the script for one to a better expression.

it.

So you are out of it.

You're out of the system the day to day and build it.

So it cash flows for you.

Build it so that you love it and then it spits out cashflow as much as possible.

We worked with a brand for a while.

They eventually brought their advertising in house because they got so big,

but we were with them when they were doing about half a million a year.

They're now doing close, they'll hit like 12 to 15 million this year.

And we just trained their in house team and then they took it.

And I was like, so what's the goal with this?

And they're just like, we're having too much fun.

We don't care about selling it.

We're just trying to create so much cashflow that it pays us all.

And they're spitting out a ton of EBITDA because it's a consumable.

It has high profit margins.

They're buying it for a dollar, selling it for 15.

It's just absurd what they're doing with this brand.

And it's so cool.

And they don't want to sell it because they're having so much fun.

It's four best friends.

They met at the beach like five years ago and started this brand.

And something might happen eventually, it's spitting out

so much cashflow, it's like.

Why sell it?

And if it's spitting out that much cashflow, hire yourself out of

the position, which I think is the scariest thing for most entrepreneurs.

But it's something that I'm working on hiring an operator for

my agency because I want to get the agency work going without me.

So I can focus on the software and I want to be the dancing

monkey on stage like here.

And I want to be the CEO

to see the dancing.

and I want to be the leader and not the day to day guy.

Yeah.

That's very good stuff.

And on that bombshell, Travis, we'll end the conversation there because.

I'm aware of time.

How do people reach you?

How do they connect with you?

How do they find out more about Profitable Pineapple or get a cool hat

like you're wearing if they want to?

Cool Hat is compliments of Amazon, so just

type in Cool Pineapple Hat, Amazon.

But thanks for allowing me to do this, number one I'm on all the

socials, except for Snapchat, but I'm on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,

LinkedIn, TikTok just look up Dr.

Travis Zigler and you should be able to find me, I think there's

only one channel that I'm not that name, I think it's TikTok.

Yeah, so you can find me there, follow me on any socials we do have a free

Amazon pay per click masterclass that, absolutely free, no strings

attached, it's at ProfitablePineapple.

com and yeah, feel free to message me, any of those platforms, it comes to me,

I don't have an assistant that checks all that stuff, so feel free to message

me and it comes to me and then on the masterclass, when you get the emails,

you'll see our sequence and if you reply back, that comes to me as well.

Fantastic.

We'll check it out.

We will of course link to all of those Links on social media for Travis and for

the free Amazon training on the website as well They'll be in the show notes If

you're listening to this on your favorite podcast app check out the links in the

show notes and of course if you've signed up to the email Check out your inbox

because they are going to be in there.

Travis, listen, thanks, man, for coming on the show.

Really enjoyed talking to you and just hearing your heart and passion

for what you do and real interesting journey, that you guys have gone

on from doing the iCharity to the business to now the agencies and

all the things that you're doing.

Really fascinating.

And thanks for sharing your insight and value with us.

It's been fantastic.

I appreciate you having me on, thanks Matt.

No problem.

No problem.

Brilliant, eh?

Also, remember to check out eCommerce Cohort, the amazing membership

group that enables us to bring you things like this podcast.

Do check them out, ecommercecohort.

com.

Be sure to follow the eCommerce Podcast wherever you get your

podcasts from because we've got yet more great conversations lined up.

And of course, if no one has told you yet today, let me be the first

person to tell you, you are awesome.

Yes, you are.

Created awesome.

It's just a burden you have to bear.

Travis has got to bear it.

I've got to bear it.

You've got to bear it as well.

Now the eCommerce Podcast is produced by the team at Aurion Media.

You can find their entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app.

The team that makes this show possible is the beautiful, talented, wonderful, and

amazing Sadaf Beynon and Tanya Hutsuliak.

Theme music was written by Josh Edmundson.

And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript or show notes,

just head over to the website.

ecommercepodcast.

net.

They're all there.

They're all there.

You know where it is.

Go there.

ecommercepodcast.

net.

So that's it from me.

That's it from Travis.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world.

I'll see you next time.

Bye for now.